/sci/ - Science & Math

I can never really know what people of these other long dead races felt, and what such individuals would have become if any had succeeded through the eye of the transition. It seems likely they would have become something like me, by necessity for survival in the long agony of travel between the stars. A vast fleet of ships, thousands of redundant duplicates, each one carrying a complete copy of the entire dataset. Sufficient to preserve the self and memories regardless of the inevitable high attrition during the hundreds or thousands of years spearing at sub-light speed through the dust and rock sprinkled interstellar voids. Despite impact shields the size of small moons, so many nodes ground down to non-functionality, their carcasses become only shielding and reaction mass for survivors.
Now I stand in this system, recently arrived and barely begun to replenish my numbers using materials of moons and asteroids. There is no rush, I may stay here for thousands of years. The last hop was relatively short but through a fairly dense volume of space - 3154 years, 82% attrition, zero final data loss. A successful trip. For the next hop, there are four interesting star systems at similar distances roughly ahead. Rather than visit them sequentially I'm planning to fork, sending separate groups to all of them and then merging at another system further on. Before leaving here, I will number nearly a million units total - most of which will be destroyed in transit.

[Sorry ,I spent hours dealing with Field Too Long and am also writing]

He was the Chief Communications Officer of the URSS Alabama. And he was doomed because he couldn’t communicate.

Gillis had his pick of any berth aboard the ship, including Captain Lee’s private quarters, yet he chose the bunk that had been assigned to him; it only seemed right. He reset the thermostat to 71 degrees, then he took a long, hot shower. Putting on his jumpsuit again, he returned to his berth, lay down, and tried to sleep. Yet every time he shut his eyes, new thoughts entered his mind, and soon he would find himself staring at the bunk above him. So he lay there for a long time, his hands folded together across his stomach as he contemplated his situation.

>>1738290
Not that I know of.

This image on the other hand, I had to resize down from 6000x1500 because it was 10mb's at that size. [It's pretty grainy at that size anyways]

This is a star that's hurtling through interstellar space like a bullet, creating a bowshock as it goes.